How to Use Organic and Paid Social Video for More Marketing Impact

Your boss is sharing articles on Linkedin; your grandmother is commenting on your Facebook photos; and while your best friend live tweets, you get a silly Snapchat from your niece. Everyone’s on social-- the internet has 3.17 billion users, and the average user has 5.54 social media accounts. Social media consumption shows no signs of slowing down. What you may have noticed is that social platforms’ algorithms are now prioritizing video content. As a marketer, you’re wondering, how do I make an impact with social video? Should I integrate paid or organic into my campaigns? The answer is both. Let’s dive into the benefits of each and then create a plan together to use them both across the customer journey.

Organic Social Video Benefits

The beauty of organic social is that the people who see your content are already interested or relevant. An individual following either your page or an important influencer in your industry, sharing brand content,is your target audience. Organic social video allows you to reach your followers in a non-intrusive way at all stages of the customer journey. Did someone like your video? That person is now very aware of your content and is starting to engage. Did they comment? You’ve got a highly engaged prospect or client, thinking about the ideas your brand is articulating. Did they share your video? Then you definitely have an advocate in your corner.

Whether you publish 10-second previews to drive viewers to your website video gallery, or upload entire videos to company social profiles, those who are seeing it, want to. When social video content is well aligned with your audience personas, it does not come off as an advertisement or a sales pitch. Your audience may be at different parts of their journey, but as you build your brand story with video, they’re able to interact with you at differing points of this process.

Organic social is a wonderful and powerful tool but modern algorithms can complicate your total exposure, obscuring you from reaching new audiences or even your entire audience of followers and fans. That’s where paid social video comes in.

Paid Social Video Benefits

You have a great video that needs exposure to a new audience. These folks aren’t on your email lists, or following your social media pages, so how do you reach them? This is where paid social comes in -- create your ideal audience with sophisticated targeting and then speak to them. With paid social video you can get your content in front of fresh eyes in the networks they check every day-- promoted posts are integrated within the feeds, keeping the user experience intact.

Reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time. Want your video to only be seen by marketers? Target marketing specialists, coordinators, CMOs, content marketers and the like. Do you want college age vegans, who go to school in specific regions, to only watch your videos in mobile? Unbelievably, you can configure your advertising settings to find these people too. Have an email list you want to reach on social media? Not a problem, upload it into the advertising platform, easy.

You can find and create new audiences with paid, but how about segmenting your current audiences on social media? What if you only wanted to reach your athletic followers? Maybe you have a product to sell that’s relevant to your clients or previous buyers, but only the ones who live by an ocean. Interests and location data like this is all available to you via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Paid social video targeting allows you to feed content to a distinct segment of your followers.

The last piece of paid social, often unexplored by brands is account-based marketing (ABM). Instead of targeting a buyer persona and casting a wide net to attract interest from these groups, you are identifying companies likely to be the best fit for your product or service on social networks. Simply upload these company names and (optionally) the titles of key influencers and decision makers within the organization, and you can use ABM to grab collective mindshare.

Integrating Paid and Organic Social

How do you tie paid and organic social together? Here are a couple of examples.

If you’re promoting a product demo, during the organic portion of your social video strategy you would upload a 30-45 second version of your demo onto YouTube and Facebook that links back to your site with the full video. This blended distribution video strategy allows customers on the engagement leg of their journey to find the video. For the paid part of your strategy, you target distinct audience segments with this content. Remember, different audiences can be found on different social networks. Take your 45-second demo video and clip this into even shorter, more specific, 10-30 second social videos. These previews should be tailored to each social network audience while covering contrasting use cases. These videos would be promoted on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pre-roll ads.

Organic and Paid Social Video Marketing Synergy

Let’s consider how we can use both methods across the customer journey--

Paid: Boost a social video post so that it reaches everyone following your page.

Engagement VideoOrganic: Mention social influencers on applicable social video content to grow digital interactions and attract common audiences.

Paid: Create different video previews of the product that cater to a unique audience segments and target each through paid social advertising.

Conversion VideoPaid: Target audiences through social video that interest them, positioning your solution. Then integrate a CTA at the end (or throughout) this video to drive them to your site for a branded content experience.

Retention VideoOrganic: Be a source of support and encouragement. Engage with followers on social media, reply to tweets and comments, answer questions and be part of the ongoing conversation surrounding your product or service. Video replies on social are a great way to engage your current customers.

Paid: Generate a video series that helps your customers be better customers! Upload a list of current customer companies or emails and boost the post to these individuals or groups so they feel empowered to use

Advocacy VideoOrganic: Continue the customer journey. Advocates are your biggest brand fans. Give them the stories they love -- featuring successful customers and the real problems they addressed using your solution. How did this impact people? Emotions will make them share on their personal platforms, exposing new audiences to your message.

An integrated social video strategy reaches prospects and customers wherever they “live” in the customer journey. Capitalize on natural interactions, segment and target audiences, or drill down with even more specificity into account based marketing, all in one campaign. Paid and organic social video work together to complement your multi-channel marketing strategy. When used effectively, your campaign is more complete and, ultimately, more successful.

Chris Bondhus is the Director of Demand Generation for the leading video platform, Brightcove. He has over 15 years of experience creating and executing marketing plans and aligning brand, product, and sales strategy to revenue objectives. Chris has designed, launched, and marketed dozens of SaaS, mobile, or cloud products for major brands including Monster.com, Carbonite, and now Brightcove. Chris incorporates demand gen expertise with analytics to attract prospects and convert them at each step of the buyer’s journey. Chris holds his MBA from Babson College.